Medical
Marijuana

Where is the compassion?

Joe
Pinson

asthma patient

served a 5 year sentence

charged with marijuana cultivation

Joe Pinson's mother, Regina, and grandmother, Amy,
testify to all the time they spent taking care of Joe as a
child, due to his severe, life-threatening bouts with
asthma. Many were the times they had to rush him to the
hospital as he was turning gray, unable to breathe. He
missed so much school one year that he was held back a
grade, and they got a private tutor to work with him at
home.

Drug after pharmaceutical drug did not help much. When
Joe was 18, his episodes suddenly stopped. For the first
time, he was able to breathe and lead a normal life.
Finally, his family thought, he must have grown out of
it.

Agents
began investigating Joe in 1991 after he bought some growing
equipment. His home utility records showed high electrical
usage. The DEA, without a search warrant, scanned his
Missouri property using a heat-sensing, infrared device from
a helicopter. Agents got a warrant and found 150 marijuana
plants in his attic. That's how his mother and grandmother
found out that Joe had not outgrown his asthma, but was
using marijuana as medicine to control it.

They seized the family home and his mother had to pay
$25,000 to get her own house back. When Pinson's lawyer
protested that the DEA fly-over had violated his Fourth
Amendment rights by unreasonable search and seizure without
a warrant, the judge ruled that he had no reasonable
expectation that the invisible heat radiating from his home
was private.

Joe was handed a five year mandatory minimum sentence for
growing his medicine. In prison, they did not give him his
medicine of choice. Instead, they prescribed him hard drugs,
such as steroids, with known harmful side effects.